My main research areas are 1) infant speech perception, segmentation, and lexical representations; and 2) phonological acquisition (perception and production). I am interested in what properties of the speech stream infants are sensitive to and whether these sensitivies change over time. I am also exploring the content of early representations. The potential richness of children's linguistic representations can be determined by examining both the perceptual abilities of infants and children's early production patterns.

Member of the Ch.I.L.D. Research Group

Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research (ACCFCR)
National Science Foundation (NSF) USA
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

Curtin, S. (2009). Twelve-month-olds learn word-object associations differing only in stress patterns. Journal of Child Language, 36, 1157-1165.

Curtin, S., Fennell, C., & Escudero, P. (2009). Weighting of acoustic cues explains patterns of word-object associative learning. Developmental Science, 12,725-731.

Curtin, S., Mintz, T.H., & Christiansen, M.H. (2005). Stress Changes the Representational Landscape: Evidence from Word Segmentation. Cognition,96, 233-262.

Werker, J.F. & Curtin, S. (2005). PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing. Language Learning and Development, 1(2), 197-234.

Curtin, S., F.R. Manis and M.S. Seidenberg (2001). Parallels between the reading and spelling deficits of two subgroups of developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14,515-547.

Book Chapters

Curtin, S., & Hufnagle, D. G. (in press). Speech Perception, development. In Larry R. Squire, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Academic Press, Oxford, 2008.

Curtin, S., & Hufnagle, D.G. (in press). Prelinguistic speech perception. In Bavin, E. (Ed.), The Cambridge University Press Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Curtin, S. & Werker, J.F. (2007). Perceptual Foundations of Phonological Development. In M. Gareth Gaskell, G.T.M Altmann, P.Bloom, A. Caramazza and P. Levelt (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press.

Conference Proceedings

Hufnagle, D., & Curtin, S. (2007). Effects of phonetic cues to membership in function word categories in artificial languages. The Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Curtin, S., Fennell, C., & Escudero, P. (2007). Infants’ recognition of vowels in a word learning task. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatiklake, & I. Woo (eds), The 31st Proceeding of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, 141-152.

Shea, C., & Curtin, S. (2006). The Acquisition of L2 Positional Constraints by Adult Learners. Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA.

Shea, C. & Curtin. S. (2006). Learning allophones from the input, in David Bamman, Tatiana Magnitskaia and Colleen Zaller (eds.), Supplement for the Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development,Boston, MA.